By Tabassum Siddiqui
Industry veteran Jennifer Beavis has spent more than three decades on the frontlines of the ever-changing music business, including several pivotal years at CMRRA as Director of Copyright – which gives her unique insight into CMRRA’s legacy as the agency celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Now Director of Rights Management at BMG Canada, Beavis recalls that her path to a career in music started when she fell in love with the Beatles – several years after the Brit phenoms had already broken up. After hearing The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl album, Beavis instantly took to the music – and was curious about the minute details listed in the liner notes.
Newly obsessed with music from the ’60s, she began tuning into Ottawa’s Chez 106 FM, whose Sunday programming featured a DJ that was “encyclopedic” about artists and songs from the era.
“I got so into listening to all the stories behind the songs – which I realized as I got older was as equally intriguing to me as the great music itself,” Beavis recalls.
“I found what songwriters do so fascinating – and the offshoot of all that, like learning that Paul McCartney had his own publishing company and digging more into that at the same time as getting into the music. I found I kept wanting to know more about the business side of things as I read articles in Rolling Stone and other music magazines.”
Beavis went on to study Communications and Political Science at university, but her interest in the music industry persisted as she decamped to England. Following graduation, despite an initial reluctance to take on yet more post-secondary schooling, Beavis decided to enroll in Fanshawe College’s two-year Music Industry Arts course after her father read about the program in the London Free Press.
“I knew it was a good opportunity, because that was one of the only music colleges that existed. Now we have many more programs, but back then, Fanshawe was where you went. So many people who went there were working in the industry,” Beavis notes.
Terry McManus, founder of the Songwriters Association of Canada and a veteran artist manager, taught the music publishing course at Fanshawe and took Beavis under his wing. He introduced her to a contact at BMG Music Publishing Canada, where she landed a role as a publishing assistant, first during college and again after graduation – a formative experience that was the start of a lifelong career in music publishing.
She later moved to a similar role at EMI Music Publishing Canada, where she regularly interacted with CMRRA, eventually leading to a new opportunity.
“I got to know a lot of people at the time at CMRRA because I would deal with them every day. They saw my resume and created a new position for me to come on to help build out the administration department,” says Beavis, who worked as CMRRA’s Director of Copyright from 1994 to 1998.
“The way CMRRA works now is different than it was then – we had distinct departments back then: Copyright, Licensing, and of course, Royalties. Now with advanced technology, it’s much more fused,” she explains.
Following her time at CMRRA, Beavis went on to work with indie-label pioneers Nettwerk Records, the Songwriters Association of Canada, and independent music company Ole, before returning to BMG in 2013, where she has remained ever since.
“I take care of all publishing for Canada. The reason why you want to have somebody who is ‘boots on the ground’ is because they have the relationships. And that’s what I had to sell – the relationships I developed throughout my career,” Beavis says. “So I think people developed a trust: ‘Okay, Jen is calling me about this – there’s probably an issue that needs to be addressed.’
“I oversee the copyright matters, and a lot of the nuts and bolts is done out of Nashville, which makes sense – but there are areas where I can step in specifically because I know Canadian copyright law, whereas Americans don’t. That takes us back to my time at CMRRA, where I was schooled in the difference between U.S. and Canadian copyright law. That way, we’re helping our clients with questions or nuances that may come up,” she points out.
With much of her work focused on income–tracking, Beavis continues to work closely with CMRRA and has seen firsthand its growth and evolution over the past five decades.
“With CMRRA, the issues are often [related to] catalogue – did you lose it? Did you gain it? What happened? It’s nice to have the day-to-day admin in a big company taken care of, like notifications, registering a song, and so on. I don’t have to do any of that – I just have to make sure that everything’s flowing properly,” she says.
Reminiscing on her time with CMRRA in the 1990s, Beavis recalls the organization’s forward-thinking approach to rights and administration – including a process she helped develop to streamline royalty disputes.
“We had a system that sent an automated letter to all publishers involved in a copyright dispute, noting that CMRRA was not the arbiter but would hold all royalties until the song rights were sorted,” she says. “With today’s technology, CMRRA’s processes are of course now more sophisticated, but that was an early step that helped fast-forward the dispute resolution process.”
Beavis points to the campaign in the late 1980s to push Canada’s mechanical royalty rate above two cents – and open the door to direct negotiations between music publishers and record labels – as a highlight in CMRRA’s legacy.
“For CMRRA and the publishers to construct the Mechanical Licensing Agreement (MLA) led to huge change – it really helped put CMRRA on the map and garnered a lot more direct members because of it,” Beavis says.
CMRRA’s forward-thinking mindset is key to its future evolution in the face of challenges posed by ever-changing technology such as streaming and AI, Beavis notes.
“What CMRRA and the rest of the industry are dealing with now is a complete change that’s beyond our control, because far fewer people buy records anymore, and streaming has changed the game. Now the industry is looking at post-sync rights with Netflix and the different DSPs,” she says.
“Our competition seems to be more global now – direct licensing, international copyright law, AI – we don’t really know where that’s going to go, as it’s still in its infancy. CMRRA is always looking at the rights that are coming into play in Canada and making sure they’re there to deal with it as soon as the agreements are made.”
Looking back at knowledge she’s carried with her from her time working at CMRRA, Beavis recalls one particularly memorable moment involving a sample dispute while working at Nettwerk, when a Canadian folk band signed to the label briefly referenced a popular song by a world-renowned UK group in the last verse of their song.
Then head of Business Affairs for the label and publishing arm, Beavis jumped into negotiating with the other band’s publishers, who immediately responded that they were seeking 50 percent of the rights to the song despite the fleeting sample. But upon checking the folk band’s contract, Beavis noticed their agreement included a controlled composition clause capped at 12 songs – and their album only featured 11.
“Because of so many artist contracts I had to read at CMRRA to understand how the MLA worked, I came up with a solution where we licensed the song as a separate track, giving the other band a percentage of the new work so they got full mechanical royalty, but no copyright in the bonus song,” she explains.
Beavis’ creative solution reflects the kind of smart, nimble thinking and deep industry knowledge that CMRRA fosters in its team – an approach she says will continue to carry the organization into the future.
“CMRRA continues to expand its horizons because they need to stay ahead of the game,” she says. “And we as publishers and collectives need to ensure we’re adapting quickly in terms of protecting our rights.”
